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Article Excerpt
Circular patterns of labor migration between Mexico and the United States play a significant role in Mexico's rural HIV epidemic. (1-6) Migrants' vulnerability to HIV partly reflects that migrants tend to be young men with little formal education and limited English skills. In addition, migrant men's vulnerability to HIV reflects the social characteristics of the communities to which they migrate, including generally more permissive norms about sexuality than are found in Mexico, the anonymity provided by being in a large urban context far from home, a lack of social support for migrants, exploitive working conditions and a lack of access to health care. (6,7)
In response to increasing awareness of the migration-HIV nexus and of the importance of prevention work with Mexican migrants in the United States, several studies have focused on migrants' sexual risk behaviors and reviewed prevention approaches used among Mexican migrants. (8) This work has described the proximate behavioral and individual correlates of sexual risk, and has stressed the need for more research on how environmental and contextual factors shape sexual risk practices among unaccompanied male migrants. (8-11) A 2007 review and metaanalysis by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, concluded with a call for research that explores "Hispanic cultural features ... along with structural factors to further disentangle the moderators of HIV risk behavior." (12 (p. 42))
The current study addresses that gap in the literature by analyzing the associations of cultural and social factors with the sexual risk of unaccompanied Mexican migrant men in Atlanta. The primary cultural constructs explored are men's ideas about masculinity, emotional intimacy, sexuality and marriage. Prior work in this migrant community (5,13-15) described a generational shift in marital ideals. Older men and women, born in rural Mexico during the 1940s and 1950s, emphasized the fulfillment of obligations shaped by gender as a key characteristic of a successful marriage. Men and women born in the 1960s and 1970s, in contrast, shared a marital ideal characterized by a growing emphasis on companionship, pleasure, emotional intimacy and, in some cases, shared decision making. For younger women, this emerging ideal framed a new understanding of sexual fidelity, which became not only a demonstration of respect but proof of love? The study described here sought to explore whether Mexican men from a migrant community similar to one in which prior research was conducted saw this new marital ideal as requiring sexual fidelity, despite the fact that they were separated from their main partners by thousands of miles and a national border.
Cultural factors such as shared beliefs about masculinity and femininity certainly shape sexual behavior, but they hardly are the only, or even the most important, determinants of behavior. (16-18) Prior work suggests that loneliness might be a significant influence on migrant men's sexual risk behavior. Unaccompanied migrant men's sexual behavior is characterized by high levels of sexual risk, both in comparison with the level of risk found among men whose wives migrate with them (10) and in comparison with the level of risk found among similar men in the Mexican communities of origin. (11) In addition, many of these men remarked on the relationship between loneliness, the alienation that characterizes migrant life and sexual risk behavior. (19) One man, for example, noted that a common reason to seek out extramarital sex is that men "miss more than anything their normal life back home, the intimacy with a spouse." Therefore, in addition to exploring how cultural constructions of masculinity and sexuality shape Mexican migrants' sexual risk, we explored how the desire for companionship and the specific social options available may relate to men's motivations for seeking sex.
This study seeks to contribute to the body of work exploring how gender relates to sexual health. Our goal is to learn how masculinity, including both culturally specific measures of Mexican migrant men's notions about gender, marriage, and sexuality and the social ways in which they demonstrate their masculinity, is connected to sexual behavior. This work extends the approach to gender most common in public health, in which gender is conceptualized as the relationship-level inequality between men and women, by including the social activities men engage in as an element of gender. (20-28) Although scales of masculinity exist, most of them have been developed among white American college students. (29,30) Existing scales developed for U.S. Latinos (31-33) do not capture the generational changes that we have observed among Mexican men both in Atlanta and in rural Mexican sending communities. (15) Furthermore, the preponderance of public health research on masculinity and health focuses on roles, beliefs, ideologies and scripts. Our analyses, in contrast, explore additional domains, including social networks and participation in leisure-time activities.
CONTEXT
In Atlanta, as throughout the southeastern United States, individuals of Mexican origin account for a growing share of both the foreign-born population and the growing Latino population. Statewide, 108,922 Latinos of any race were enumerated in Georgia in 1990, accounting for 2% of the state's overall population; in 2000, these figures were 435,227 and 5%, respectively. (34,35) In Georgia's Dekalb County (where this research took place), the growing enrollment of children for whom Spanish is a primary language (36) suggests that this population includes not just individual migrant laborers such as those who are the focus of this study, but also families who have migrated to the area and settled down. Many migrants, however, are male laborers who travel alone, drawn by opportunities for employment in residential construction and landscaping, agriculture and food processing, and light industry (such as the carpet mills of northern Georgia). (37-39)
The 10-county Atlanta metropolitan area, which was home to some 3.4 million people when these data were collected, reflects these regional trends. Atlanta includes some of the fastest growing counties (in terms of population size) in the United States; much of this growth is a result of increases in the Latino population. (40)
METHODS
Study Design and Sample
The data for this analysis were collected for a mixed-methods study that consisted of two phases. In the first phase, ethnographic observations and 31 semistructured interviews were conducted among men from Maravatio, in the state of Michoacan, between May and September of 1999. The interviews covered men's demographic attributes, migration, work experience, ideas about masculinity, sexuality, marriage and extramarital sexual relationships. Findings from this portion of the research are presented elsewhere. (19) In the second phase, a structured survey that included items about sexuality, masculinity and marriage that were based on findings from the first phase as well as the first author's prior research with Mexican migrant families in Atlanta and in two sending communities in rural Mexico (13-15) was used to explore the associations between cultural and social aspects of masculinity and the sexual behavior of Mexican migrant men. Inclusion criteria were having been born in Michoacan, Mexico; having been in the United States for a minimum of a month; and having a wife who was in Mexico or having una relacion de pareja (a couple relationship) with someone in Mexico. In both phases of the study, all data collection took place in Spanish.
The lack of a sampling frame for this population, combined with the men's mobility and largely undocumented status, made probability sampling difficult, if not impossible. (9) Therefore, we selected a community-based convenience sample that was based on extensive ethnographic knowledge of the migrant community in Atlanta. The first phase of the study involved work with local community networks to choose a soccer team in Atlanta's northern suburbs that represented a particular Mexican sending community. This team represented the universe of ethnographic research inquiry and the starting point for recruiting individuals to participate in the study. The sample for the survey consisted of 200 men who either lived in the apartment complex that was adjacent to the field where this team practiced or played in the soccer league that practiced there. The six Latino male interviewers had attended soccer games throughout the prior season, during which time they became well known to residents of the apartment complex and members of the league.
This study was submitted for review to the institutional review board at Emory University. Study goals, instruments and procedures were also reviewed by a community advisory board, which included representatives from the Mexican consulate, a prominent local priest whose parish was composed largely of Mexican immigrants, and a social worker who directed a...
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